Light and Compact Dust Shoe for CNC3040T-DQ

I treated myself to a Chinese Import CNC Printer a couple of months ago, these machines fall at the affordable end of the CNC market. It will not be a surprise then that they arrive with very few frills included. You get an aluminium constructed machine, a control box with some cheap and not always cheerful controlling electronics. and a box of starter mill ends and bed clamps. Once I had my machine up and running, it became obvious that controlling dust was going to take priority.

Today I 3D printed my (alpha version) dust shoe for the CNC3040.

I decided that in order to make the dust shoe easily printable I would make it in two parts. I also wanted this to be a lightweight device as the CNC3040T router is not especially powerful. The thickest part is the main body of the dust shoe (The first picture above) which provides the strength of the part. The smaller of the two holes on it clamp the motor on the CNC3040T. This spindle is the 52mm diameter model, though the part of it that I am clamping to is 26mm in diameter. The Larger hole is designed to hold a Dyson DC04 hose.

The walls of the top of the dust shoe I printed at 0.5mm (well 0.6 is what comes out my printer). This is obviously very thin and flexible under normal circumstances and fragile to boot. However when the lid is bonded in place, the thin and puny walls become strong, much like a cardboard box gains it’s strength when it is finally taped shut. The benefit to this thin walled design weight and compactness.

In order to bond the two pieces together I used a glue made by dissolving scrap ABS with Acetone. This stuff is easy to make and useful whenever you need to bond ABS parts together (also very good for preparing a print bed for a difficult ABS print) I smeared this on liberally and pushed the lid over the top part. The lid has a small rim that the top of the Dust Shoe.

I messed around a bit with this piece. First I tried brushing on the ABS glue to strengthen the sides. It came out strong enough, but the finish was a bit lumpy. To smooth things I then tried vapour smoothing the assembled part. This smoothed things out a little, but some of the lumps and bumps remain. I am not too concerned as this is going on a tool so does not have to be beautiful. As my MKI part, I also reckon it has a limited lifespan.

Fitting wise the part worked out very well. I have a very well worn Dyson DC04 in the garage working as my workshop vacuum and the hose accessory is a perfect fit. I designed the part so that the moving part of the spindle would be exposed for easy tool changes. The Dust Shoe certainly does not cause any problems here. My design is compact and unobtrusive.

The dust shoe doing it’s stuff.

As far as efficiency goes, it certainly seems to do a job. The hole where spindle protrudes is also the hole where the dust is sucked in by the vacuum. Because the inlet is a reasonable distance from the piece it is not especially concentrated where it would need to be to pick up everything, but it does seem to be effective in picking up most stuff that is either very fine (The stuff I especially want rid of) or is heavier but kicked up by the end mill. Some of the heavier shavings get blown away by the cooling fan that is part of the spindle. If you watch the video footage you can see some of the material vortex into the dust shoe.

Other dust shoes that I have seen have either a flexible plastic curtain or bristles around the shoe to create a tent around the piece. I will be looking out for something of this nature to see if I can improve on the efficiency of my design.

The files should you wish to make your own dust shoe are available on my Github pages. The part was made in OpenScad and is parametric to a degree. It should not be too difficult to adjust this design to fit other vacuum hoses and/or spindles.